CTA

Eurekahedge's latest report gives a number of timelines for grappling with changes in the hedge fund world: since 2007; since January 2013; YTD January 2015. In any frame, you don't have to be a meteorologist....

Managed futures are performing quite poorly. They also have a higher standard deviation than the HF industry aggregate, so it seems that if you're invested there your losses are at least buying you greater risk. [Wait. That can't be right.]

In 2010 AlphaMetrix held a conference in Miami with Harry Markopolos as the keynote speaker. Markopolos' claim to fame is that he told the regulators about Madoff''s Ponzi Scheme, but his words fell on deaf ears. In 2013 AlphaMetrix, which claimed to the be the transparent antidote to Madoff stood accused by the CFTC of moving money in ways it ought not and in 2014, the principals of the firm are asking for a jury trial. It is indeed a tangled web and it is unlikely to be un-weaved any time soon.

Welton has modeled an investment approach, specifically a multi-asset class trend following approach, and has measured how it would have performed if back-fitted into certain periods of sustained and sharp interest rate increases in the decades since the death of Bretton Woods.

To encourage further exchange and understanding, I went back to Mr. Rice, after reading a comment from our reader, and asked him to expand on managed funds and their noncorrelation with traditional (largely equity) investment strategies.
Tags, Agriculture, Commodities, Derivatives

Three scholars find a very real possibility that there is a cause and effect relationship between index flows in the derivatives markets, at least the agricultural index markets, on the one hand and price moves in the underlying commodity on the other.

This book, The Alternative Answer: The Nontraditional Investments that Drive the World's Best-Performing Portfolios is an appeal to the retail investor, to those author Bob Rice calls "typical investors," passing along the good news that they are no longer "stuck with the children's menu of investment options."

As a three-judge panel of the D.C. Appeals Court saw it, there were two questions in the Brian Hunter case. First, did the CEA’s language encompass manipulation of NG futures contracts as part of the exclusive jurisdiction of intervener CFTC? Second, if so, was that repealed or modified by the 2005 legislation?

Ninety-one percent of the respondents to a recent survey strongly believed there was a breakdown in audit procedures in the futures world. The comments section for that question displayed what the survey sponsor, Horizon Cash Management, calls “widespread frustration and anger.”

There has been a perhaps-unexpected consequence of the disappearance of the old-fashioned floor traders. Floor trading used to serve as a training regimen, "from which many of the industry's leading discretionary traders originated." Without the floors, the talent pool has dried up.

According to its advocates, trend following as a strategy works from the premise that price trends represent a process of consensus building. As a new idea takes hold, "the earliest adopters of this idea place their trades in accordance with it" and they get to watch in satisfaction as "a growing mass of market participants adopts the same thesis. Early adopters can surf the wave to the beach.

Consultants expect that managers' need to generate steady income in a low interest rate environment will drive a lot of portfolio turnover in 2012, inclusive of the movement of alternatives into core positions within portfolios, and it will drive one-time U.S. focused investors and managers to look abroad. Meanwhile, pensions are retreating toward passive mandates.

The Grant Thornton paper maintains that the asset management industry achieved "performance and operational efficiencies" during 2011, and this sounds like the sort of marginal adaptation that play a large part in Charles Darwins' writings, to which GT's Winstoin Wilson alluded. But ... the report also treats the regulatory environment as a meteor, capable of wiping out even the best-adapted of pre-collision dinosaurs. So "the Darwinian process" is an odd label for what it describes.

With the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act (more formally the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) in 2010, Congress demanded change. It did not specifically demand changes in the rules relating to CPOs, but it did demand that the SEC change certain rules regarding hedge fund advisors, and the CFTC has decided that a reconsideration of the CPO rules is “consistent with the tenor of the provisions” of that act because the “sources of risk delineated in the Dodd-Frank Act with respect to private funds are also presented by commodity pools.”

On Oct. 30, a Sunday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission received a draft report from MF Global that for the first time showed a shortfall in the segregated funds, a deficit of $900 million. At this time, both MF Global and the CFTC were referring to this in anodyne terms as an “accounting error.”

There is an old story often attributed to economist Burton Malkiel. A professor of finance and an undergraduate are walking together. They see what looks like a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. The naïve student bends down to pick it up, but the professor says, “Don’t bother. If it were a real bill, it […]

Commodities have been the big story of the past decade – almost a repeat of the inflation-burdened 1970s. If hems reflect stock market sentiment, we should be seeing an outbreak of bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes. Certainly, a new cohort of investors, institutional and retail alike, see price rises in the elements core inflation strips out – namely food and energy – as a secular shift. Still, appearances can be deceiving. A recent study argues a long-only bet on commodities is likely to result in a return that is statistically 0: not the 1970s at all.

Chris Brodie has been trading commodities for over 20 years, and set up Krom River in 2006. Scotsman Brodie relocated to Zug in Switzerland several years ago and has no regrets about the move. The fund’s best year so far was 2008 when it rose by 37% while the GSCI fell by two thirds, and it was also up in August of this year. Krom River are running both discretionary and systematic funds, and also have a dedicated agricultural vehicle. We touched on a range of topics that CAIA candidates and charterholders will be familiar with. Krom River is a signatory of the Hedge Fund Standards Board that has been discussed on AAA.